COLIN SEMPER

SERMON 5 of 5 – 13/04/008

THE DESCENT INTO SECULARISM

So far, I have tried to illuminate the descent into secularism by pointing the finger at myself, us, and what we have done or not done in the past 45 years. In the first address I said that we had diminished God often with the best of motives - because we wanted to confront a godless generation with a god to believe in. A mistake. Secondly, I said that we have failed to communicate a distinctive God centred on Christian spirituality in the face of the self-realisation industry of the New Age Movement.

Thirdly, I said we had been obsessed by ecclesiastical politics instead of telling our stories of faith. Fourthly, we have not worked hard enough to bring in a language which carries mystery and power and which all of us can feel better for using.

Lastly, today. We have lost confidence in the Bible, mostly because we see it wrongly and use it wrongly.

Quite often people say – read the Bible as literature, read it as a story, read it for King James poetry, read it for history, read it for the insight it gives into ancient ways. Don’t worry about the religious faith. Read it like any other book.

The trouble with this is that it isn’t like any other book. The Bible hangs heavy on the conscience of our country, I think. As a nation, perhaps, we think we ought to read it because of the Bible’s mark on Western Civilisation over many centuries. But, let us be honest, most people read bits. And most people have good reason for not reading it. The format is akin to the phone directory. And it may look dull because it is dull. It repeats itself. Read the prophets. It is soporific – read the dietary laws even the recipe for anointing oil. Last Wednesday I read the whole of Leviticus and was very glad when 2 of the grandchildren came to destroy the place with their new plastic crossbows. Leviticus is full of barbarism, fanaticism, self-righteousness and self-pity.

There is the sublime rubbing shoulders with the crass – my all time favourite example is Psalm 137 – gorgeous - ‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered thee, oh Zion’ and then ‘Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock’. Or there’s the civilised law that says that a newly married man must be exempt from military service so he can be happy with his new wife. And then there is the injunction that Israel is to destroy, utterly, conquered people, showing no mercy.

The Bible is a library of books written over a period of 3000 years or so – often tedious, barbaric, obscure, contradictory, inconsistent. The Bible is a compost – a stew of poetry and propaganda, myth and murk, history and hysteria. It’s been associated with tub-thumping Evangelism, dreary piety, superstition and moralising, with more than a dash of crippling literalism.

Enough! Enough of this polemic! And yet, just because the Bible is about the sublime and the unspeakable, it is about the way life really is. It is about people who at one and the same time are believing and unbelieving, innocent and guilty, crusaders and crooks, full of hope and full of despair. In other words it is a book about us. And it is also a book about God – a God gradually revealing himself over the millennia, a God we believe in and a God we don’t believe in. A dynamic God – a witty God (Jonah) – a loving God – a forgiving God – a God who understands the basic dilemma of human beings (Romans 7) and who offers hope (Romans 8) – a God who reveals himself in ever deeper ways.

Now, in Leviticus are hundreds of laws – about sacrifice, the purification of women, about skin disease, mildew, unclean bodily discharges, about blood, about sexual practices, about holiness and justice, about festivals, priesthood, about the poor, about gifts. All dating from the life of a nomadic people between say 750 to 500 BC. And in the midst of stuff about God preferring one sort of smoke and not another, there is this sentence that threatens to divide our church. No man is to have sexual relations with another man; God hates that. For our church to be divided, to do this is a travesty. It isn’t decent Biblical theology. It’s an insult to the inspiration of Holy writ. It fails to see what the great Bible scholars of the last century called the sitz im leben, the situation in life, it treats the Bible like some sort of Almanac, it ignores the fact that the Holy Spirit of God has been brooding over the chaos we have created since the foundation of the world.

As I have said to you before – think of a window. Don’t look where the flies have landed. Look through the window into the world beyond.

Last Monday, we all came to Helen’s funeral. And in the midst of it Matthew read 1 Corinthians 13. He spoke it in stentorian tones until the end when, quite naturally, he connected with the love he had and has for Helen. You see, the Bible is not a Holy Bore. It is the Word of God that speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves.

Can anyone ask for more?

Amen